In an interview Sunday with CNN’s Brian Stelter during “Reliable Sources,” Messenger said that the paper had considered dropping Will even before that column.

“We had a lot of readers very angry and very hurt,” Messenger said. “It caused us to go back and take a look at it, and it reinforced our previous decision that he had lost a little bit of speed off his fastball, and it caused us to make the decision a little bit more quickly than we would have otherwise.”

“A lot of the responses that were negative to our decision accused us of doing so for political correctness,” Messenger added. “That’s not the case. We believe that the column trivializes sexual assault victims.”

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch wasn’t the only paper that took issue with the column. The Chicago Tribune passed on running it. “I thought the column was misguided and insensitive,” the Tribune’s editorial page editor Bruce Dold told watchdog site Media Matters.